A Palette Of Irish Gems

Exhibit Shows Emerald Isle's Art Not Limited To Literature

October 12, 1997|By OWEN McNALLY; Courant Staff Writer

Ireland, a tiny island, has produced a disproportionate number of famous and even infamous writers, including such icons of modernism as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, household names in homes around the world where books and the word are revered.

But ask most folks outside the Emerald Isle about Ireland's contribution to the world of painting, and you'll likely draw a blank.

``Irish painting? Really? Is there any?''

At best, you might get a response about the Book of Kells, that ultra-deluxe, illuminated manuscript of holy writ crafted by medieval Irish monks. But as powerful, glorious and enduring as the Book of Kells is, that Celtic contribution to Western art was created, after all, almost 14 centuries ago.

Quite happily, Brian P. Burns, America's greatest collector of Irish art, and the Yale Center for British Art are shedding light on this long obscured area of Hibernian culture with a brilliant exhibition of 70 paintings handsomely displayed at the downtown New Haven museum.

``Yale's school color is blue, but here at the Center for British Art we say green,'' says director Patrick McCaughey of the first show of Irish paintings that the Yale Center has presented since it opened in 1977.

Among the crown jewels are a dazzling trove of mesmerizing, mysterious paintings by Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), a mystic and sometimes joyous, sometimes melancholic romantic expressionist. Yeats, kid brother to the famous Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, is universally regarded as Ireland's greatest painter of the 20th century.

Yeats portrayed Irish culture passionately, riffing on such themes as the freedom of the sea and open road, the joy of the circus, the physicality of horses, the metaphysicality of ghostly images of the living and the dead, and the glory of golden youths and roses as glimmering symbols of life.

Looking at Yeats' seductive, regal, richly colored flights of imagination in the stunning suite of paintings at Yale, you can see why critics crowned him king of Irish painters.

``Irish Paintings From the Collection of Brian P. Burns,'' which has enjoyed critical acclaim and big turnouts in runs this year in Dublin and Boston, covers a century of Irish history from about 1840, just before the devastation of the Great Famine, to the beginning of World War II.

``The story of this exhibition,'' McCaughey says ``is the story of how Ireland becomes Ireland, the nature of Irishness, and the richness, diversity, the complexity of being Irish. To paraphrase Henry James: It's a complex fate being an Irish artist.''

At the exhibition's entrance, you're immediately greeted by John Henry Foley's half-size bronze statues of the political philosopher Edmund Burke and writer Oliver Goldsmith.

Directly in front of the two figures -- the show's unofficial greeter/guardians -- is a glass showcase stocked with rare books and publications rippling with prose and poetry lauding the heroes and mourning the martyrs of the bloody Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin.

Elizabeth Fairman, Yale's curator of rare books and archives, has assembled more than 100 rare books and manuscripts that provide historical counterpoint to the paintings throughout the exhibition.

Among the gems under glass are first editions of Joyce's ``Finnegans Wake'' and ``Ulysses''; a priceless lode of William Butler Yeats memorabilia and writings, plus a striking photo of Maude Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist and object of the poet's hopelessly obsessive love. There are journalistic reports and sketches from contemporary journals about the Great Famine of the 1840s. Caused by a potato blight, the famine was responsible for the deaths of a million Irish and the diaspora of millions more, including some 1.6 million who emigrated to the United States. Most moving are the firsthand news accounts of the deadly grim life aboard typhus-ridden ``coffin ships'' that transported uprooted Irish across the Atlantic.

Looking down from a high vantage point at the literary relics encased near the entranceway is a rare copy of a street poster from the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic declaring independence from the British at the time of the unsuccessful Easter Rebellion.

``We declare the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland and the unfettered control of the Irish Destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible,'' the poster declares.

There are lovely paintings celebrating the landscape, particularly in the west of Ireland. Among these lyrical, sentimental works are Paul Henry's ``Spring in Connemara,'' graced with a sweeping slate-blue mountain range looking down on thatched-roof cottages.

``They are grand images of the Irish imagination,'' says McCaughey, ``a world remote and untouched by the depredations of England and British civilization.''